Original design for initial letters for Kelmscott Press

1883–1889

Engels, Shaw, Stepniak and Kropotkin: the circle of the left

Ernest Belfort Bax introduced him to Engels, who thought Morris honest but lacking the practical skills to aid the proletarian revolution; in “Justice” he befriended George Bernard Shaw, and despite being a Marxist he became close to the anarchists Stepniak and Peter Kropotkin, whose views influenced him.

1885–1891

Editor of “Commonweal”, the League’s paper

From February 1885 he edited the Socialist League’s weekly “Commonweal” for six years, with contributions from Engels, Shaw, Paul Lafargue, Wilhelm Liebknecht and Karl Kautsky; he wrote articles and poems for it and kept it financially afloat; in 1891, when the League’s influence passed to the anarchists, he withdrew from active involvement.

January 1890 – March 1891

“News from Nowhere”: a socialist’s utopia

From January to October 1890 he serialised in “Commonweal” his utopian novel “News from Nowhere”, an answer to Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” that pictured a future of harmony between people and their environment in which work is a joy; the paper’s circulation rose markedly, the novel appeared as a book in March 1891, and by 1900 it had been translated into five languages and become a classic of Europe’s socialists.

1891

He founds the Kelmscott Press

In 1891 he founded the Kelmscott Press to revive medieval traditions of bookmaking: small print runs and hand work from papermaking to printing (vellum for some books); he laid out every book himself, drew initials and miniatures and designed typefaces, and Burne-Jones and Walter Crane collaborated with him.

1896

The Chaucer edition: the summit of his work with Burne-Jones

In 1896 the edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer appeared — one of the peaks of Morris’s collaboration with Burne-Jones: Burne-Jones made the illustrations, while Morris devised three typefaces — Golden, Troy and Chaucer — and framed the text in intricate floral borders resembling illuminated medieval manuscripts.

3 octobre 1896

Died